MWR : Bethel radio adds Low German

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Dec. 7, 2009 issue

Bethel radio adds Low German

By Bethel College staff

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — A Low German radio program with a growing body of listeners in North America and Latin America has added Bethel College’s KBCU to its list of host stations.

Willmar Harder, right, talks with Carl Zacharias during Fall Festival at Bethel College this fall. Harder helped to get Zacharias’ half-hour Low German radio program onto the schedule of Bethel’s KBCU. — Photo by Melanie Zuercher

Zachries Fetalt (Zacharias Speaks) is now airing on 88.1 FM Monday through Friday at 6 p.m. It can be heard at the same time via streaming video at bethelks. edu/kbcu/index.php.

The half-hour program includes 15 minutes of news and interviews, a personal commentary; toon aewa no kenktjen (“something to reflect on”); and a humor segment (stories about “Fritz and Franz”). It is the mission and labor of love of Carl Zacharias of Reinland, Man., who spent many of his formative years as a child and teenager among Low German-speaking Mennonites in Paraguay and Belize and also did two terms of service with Mennonite Central Committee among Low German people in Bolivia.

Zacharias was on the Bethel campus for Fall Festival in early October and participated in the Low German program hosted this year by Low German speakers Harold Thieszen, a retired Mennonite pastor from North Newton, and Willmar Harder, pastor of Hoffnungsau Mennonite Church in rural Inman.

Harder, a Bethel graduate, was a programmer for KBCU in his student days and was instrumental in working with station manager Tim Buller to put Zachries Fetalt on KBCU.

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